The Moment - a Structure of Mind and World in Hans Christian Andersen's Poetic Writings

Johan de Mylius

(summary for pages 57-74)

In his very first book, dealing with Andersen as a novelist,
Kier­ke­gaard accused the writer of having no general view of
life, mean­ing that Andersen was not capable of organizing a poetic
world as an ob­ject­ive and balanced testimony of order and
per­sonally achieved meaning­fulness.

Kierkegaard was both right and wrong. Andersen undoubtedly
shared the general idea of his time, an idea of immanent meaning
grasped through personal growth and development. And he gave shape to
such views in both novels (The Improvisatore and The Two
Baronesses) and fairy tales ("The Snow Queen" and
"The Fir Tree"). Nevertheless, Andersen based his idea of
growth not on social iden­tity but on concepts of nature, nature
often opposed to social order and therefore isolating the individual
from an under­standing of him­self as fulfilling his
destination in the course of time, in other words: as a historical
being.

To Andersen meaning is not so much an insight as a total
and in­tense experience of the satisfaction of deep desires.

The focus fixed by Andersen on both this type of experience
and on nature leads to the consequence that Andersen isolates with
in­creas­ing force the unique moment as the one and
only possi­bility of experi­en­cing meaning.

"The Last Dream of the Old Oak Tree", "A
Story of the Sand-Dunes", "The Marsh King's
Daughter", and even "The Little Match Seller" prove the
existence and significance of this structure of mind and world in
Andersen's works. It is a structure very similar to what is known
as the central experiences of mysticism, although Andersen himself was
no mystic at all.

But it is also a structure which can be found in later
periods of literary history, in symbolism and expressionism, as a token
of a modern disillusioned search for metaphysical experience in a world
incapable of giving answers.